The Great Qi dynasty has stood for three hundred years, but its golden age is only an old dream now. All that remains are oppressive laws and famine, leaving the people barely able to breathe.
Liu Sanlang, top scholar at fourteen, lost both parents and his elder brother in the space of three years. His home is bare, leaving only his eighteen-year-old widowed sister-in-law, Yang Yuewan, and his three-year-old nephew, Liu Xiachan.
The merciless law forces his sister-in-law to remarry, so he defies fate with his own strength: “I'll marry my sister-in-law and protect her and her child for the rest of their lives.”
From then on, he farms and studies to preserve the family legacy, struggling to survive in a chaotic age and holding the Liu family together in the face of despair.
He despises the man-eating Great Qi and the government that treats human life as worthless, so he joins the rebel army and fights through bloodshed, bringing the rotten dynasty to an end with his own hands.
When the new dynasty is founded, he turns down a marquis's vast fief, asking only to return to the life of a scholar, sit the special examination, and earn the title of top scholar, governing the realm through learning.
Only when he stands in the Golden Hall does he discover that the woman he has protected for half his life, his sister-in-law, is the elder sister of the Great Xia emperor.
After a lifetime of hardship, at last comes a happy ending.
Yuewan rests by the willow boughs, forever by Hengzhi's side; cicadas sing through summer beside the emerald lotus pond.
This is a heartwarming story about a poor scholar who protects his family, avenges his loved ones, rises from adversity, and brings peace to the realm.
